Re: [Caml-list] Why isn't there a common platform for functional language interaction ?

[Philippe Strauss <philou@philou.ch>]

On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 09:44:01PM +0100, Diego Olivier Fernandez Pons wrote:
> 
> What I see as the very first issue is the spread of the efforts between
> similar yet incompatible ML dialects leading to 4 weak communities (SML,
> OCaml, F#, Haskell) instead of a really strong one and all the related
> problems that come with it (fewer books, risk for industrials, work
> duplication, inefficient funding, lack of visibility, etc).
> 
> Example : there is an excellent whole source code optimiser ... for SML.
> And an award winning SMT solver ... in Caml developed in a company that
> invests heavily in information-centric web applications ... in F# (
> http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/z3/ if you don't
> know Nikolaj Bjorner's Z3). Now say you want to do an application that
> delivers optimal electricity production plans. What language do you choose ?

Sure but is there any effort not based on free will limitation which would works ?
Marketing, an attractive website, an packaging/oasis-db like thing, good introductory tutorials (I've appreciated
the chapter1 of jon harrop, btw), a distro maybe based on batteries or ... argh.

Each piece of software, libraries, exist becaus of a reserch project, someone choosing ocaml as
the tool of choice, or spare-time and leisure. This diversity is the consequence of free will.
sometimes it's waste of resources, but try to join each resources by email and convince
them to unify their efforts. Or give them compensation for it.

Joining together jane-street core and batteries, you can already forget about it, so joining
ML/Haskell/OCaml/F# efforts together...

And people getting away from for example c-- or llvm based lower level stuff, there's always an explanation
of lower "energy" like barrier to get a thing done, writing your own stuff rather than diving and get drown in a monster, etc...

that's open source devel.

> Just being able to reuse the source-code between string ML dialects even
> after recompilation (X -> CoreML -> specific platform) would be an
> improvement.

-- 
Philippe Strauss
av. de Beaulieu 25
1004 Lausanne
http://www.philou.ch